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WebEx & the Human Network
Cisco spent a whole bunch of their $20B in cash today and purchased WebEx for $3.2B. This is especially touching to me as I was an early employee at WEBX and still have a bunch of friends over there. I'm very excited for them as I think that this is a great deal for both Cisco & WebEx.
First, Cisco owns the router business. A significant portion of Internet traffic is going through Cisco routers, but they aren't making any dough on that traffic. While the growth of the router industry for the next couple of years is going to be decent, I can't imagine that it is going to set any records. With the exception of a big pop last August, their stock has been pretty flat for the past 3 or more years. This would explain their buying binge over the past couple of weeks. Cisco needs these content providers like WebEx & FiveAcross in order to generate a more recurrent / predictable / growing revenue stream. In the grand scheme of things, WebEx's $380M a year in revenue won't make a huge dent in their $30B in revenue a year, but 10 WebEx's, will.
I tend to agree with Om Malik's opinion in that they may be doing acquisitions like this in order to compete with everyones favorite frenemy, Microsoft. It does seem like a great deal for the WebEx guys as now they have a hella deep pockets to extend their already majority market share.
The thing that is really amazing to me is the valuation that they received. Coming from a company that was just acquired for $3.2B, I look at this deal of selling for almost 10x revenue and really think that we got a raw deal. I look at YouTube being acquired for an unknown multipler and wonder if I should really be focused on selling software or get back in the Web 2.0 space.
Congrats, WebEx guys!!!
Thoughts on the ORCL / HYSL Acquisition
Now that I've had a few days to think about the Larry buying the HYSL, I'm really starting to understand why this is such a good move for ORCL. While I still don't know what it means for me or what my future is, I get it from a shareholders perspective and want to see more like this. My thoughts in no particular order:
- I'm not rich. I've only been at Hyperion for 5 months. I wish stock brokers would stop calling me and wanting to invest my new found riches for me. Seriously.
- Most of our customers dig this acquisition. Well, most of our customers that aren't SAP customers. Those guys don't dig it too much. For the most part, though, customers think that this makes a lot of sense and, long term, this will really be good for them.
- While I don't think that they would say it outright, it seems like ORCL has given up with competing directly with MSFT. It makes sense for them to focus on the major enterprise apps. They've clearly got the market cornered there.
- If and when I meet Larry, I have ask him about the NC. I thought that this was a great idea and, essentially, we've gotten there, but it isn't all based on ORCL databases. Perhaps I just dated myself.
- This is the first acquisition I've gone through. It is interesting. One of the major challenges is trying to figure out how to motivate people who are 100% certain to be out of work in 45 days. I believe that sales, for the most part, will be okay, but finance, IT, operations, etc. They are redundant and not real keen on helping out sales guys doing a fire sale.
- I'm amazed at how few blogs picked this up. A quick search on IceRocket provides only 1,062 results. Technorati has 1,316 results. This was a $3.3 billion acquisition. The largest technology acquisition that I can recall in sometime and it got an 1,316 blog posts? Tim O'Reilly's investment into Wesabe got 706 blog posts. This says to me that, despite the 55 million blogs registered with Technorati, blogs are still very much a Web 2.0 & paparazzi phenomenon in terms of content.
Me & Uncle Larry
News came out tonight that Oracle will be buying Hyperion for about $3 billion. Personally, I'm of the opinion that this is too cheap, but I'm not on the board. No details were released, but I'll publish as things come out.
Hyperion Smart BI
Hyperion just launched a great new BI micro-site:
http://smartbi.hyperion.com
It is a great site despite the guy being a little annoying and not nearly as funny as the guy from the Philips Extra Inch site. The site is good, though and very informative. It does an especially good job in showing SmartSearch and our integration into Google's OneBox. Also, while I've never been sold on widgets, I do think that we are on to something by providing BI based widgets. It will be good for C level execs to be able to see this data in realtime located on the desktop. It essentially makes the important business reports available at the business owners fingertips without having to pull a bunch of reports. I'll be interested to see how this catches on.
Predictions Pt. 2
As I pat myself on the back for a stellar 2006 performance, I look forward to 2007. Frankly, I'm not feeling as confident in my calls as I've been heads down in a new job and haven't been able to keep up with what is really going on in the world.
Facebook will not be acquired: $2B is the number that Mark Zukerberg is holding out for. That is a lot of money and even if it is becoming cooler than MySpace, it won't be long before someone realizes that, in order to command a $2B market cap, you need to have about $500M in revenue. In order to get $500M in revenue, you need to do a lot of sponsorships, serve a lot of impressions and have a user base that will actually click on an ad once in a while. Right now, Facebook has the impressions, but I have yet to see a lot of ads on the site. If someone does acquire Facebook for $2B, they will need to change it up pretty dramatically in order to get the money back on this deal. This, like NewsCorp's acquisition of MySpace, will make it uncool again and the kids will bail.
America's Atheism Movement: I just finished Richard Dawkins book, The God Delusion, if you are on the fence at all about religion, it will change your life. I'll do a review in the next couple of days. As seen all across his book tour, leaders in science and technology flock to see Dawkins speak. What Dawkins book does, is that it gives people permission to call themselves Atheists without feeling guilty or like second class citizens. As more people become empowered by this, they will band together and rise up. It will be a long time before an Atheist is elected president of this country, but if a Muslim can be in congress, it seems like common sense that an Atheist can too. The question will be is do they want to?
DJIA: The Dow will close at the end of 2007 at 13,249. Don't ask me why, it just seems like a good number.
Death: Roughly 2.5 million Americans will die this year, mostly of old age and heart disease. It's inevitable, but it doesn't mean that you can't make a couple of bucks off of it. Do you have a good healthcare company in your portfolio?
eBay / Yahoo Merger: This has been circulating through the rumor mill for sometime and it is due in order for both companies to compete with GOOG. I agree with John Batelle that new leadership is needed at EBAY and with new leadership coming to Yahoo, it might be a good time to finalize this.
BI will Get Bigger: I have to believe this as it is what I do, but as more and more companies weight growth by acquisition, managing this in Excel will become too cumbersome, unreliable and inaccurate. These companies will invest in BI tools to, amongst other things, help manage these acquisitions.
US Car Companies: GM or Ford, probably Ford, will hit upon hard times and look to the government, Toyota, or a leveraged buy-out firm, to help them out. I've said it 100 times in the past, please just shut down the lights, and close Detroit. Nothing is going to save these companies.
Environmental Impact: I was disappointed that Inconvenient Truth didn't contain a fix. Do I believe that the environment is in bad shape, absolutley. The challenge that we have is that there isn't a simple fix that can be implemented by 300 million plus people that will make a difference. Come up with this and you will make a bazillion dollars. Perhaps, as Seth Godin points out, we must change to CF lightbulbs immediately. A simple idea to force millions to change their life slightly is needed. 2007 will be the year for that.
Politics: It will be a big year for politics as people start throwing their respective hats in the ring for the 2008 presidential race. Obama is obvious. Joe Biden has said that he will run. Hillary Clinton, Rudy Guiliani, John McCain are all in the running. My thoughts on a dark horse are Mark Warner. By September, he will be in the race in some capacity or another.
Apple iPhone: The phone will launch. AT&T / Cingular will screw something up in the first rev and it will have all sorts of carrier problems (even though I really want one anyway). Apple will lose the suit from Cisco on the trademarked name and change the name of the product to iVox.
Microsoft Zune: By the end of the year, the only people that you know that own a Zune will be the ones that got it for free as a giveaway. MSFT will announce a partnership with Nokia to merge the Zune and a phone in order to compete with iVox. It won't work.
That is a good start. I'm looking forward to 2008 to see how these turned out.
Training Day
PriusPalooza
CNN came to Hyperion today to highlight our Drive Clean to Drive Change program. In short, HYSL is offering employees a $5,000 incentive to purchase alt-fuel vehicles.
It is great to be part of a company that is doing so many wonderful things socially as well as technologically. As an employee, this is a great incentive to sell my ass off so that my Tesla will only be $75,000.
A couple of other pictures are on my Flickr page.
First Day of Work
Today was my first day at Hyperion. Thus far, things were pretty cool. My posts will be fairly sporadic while I get up and running.
It was a typical first day. Orientation, lunch and meet new peeps and do some training. Sipping from the firehose right now. Cool stuff coming from HYSL, though.
More to come as I learn more and get going full spped.
